Italian media conglomerate Mediaset Group has sued YouTube for €500 million (around £394million), alleging the Google video-sharing site illegally hosts thousands of video clips that belong to Mediaset.

It may come as no surprise to many who spend a lot of time on Google's popular video Web site YouTube, but the service accounts for one out of every three videos viewed online. Market research form comScore said that YouTube accounted for over three billion of the over nine billion videos viewed in January 2008.

YouTube Wednesday unveiled new tools aimed at allowing third party Web sites to build their own YouTube capabilities by providing developers with access to the YouTube video library and underlying video hosting and streaming infrastructure.
As a result, Web site operators can now allow their users to upload video and access their YouTube accounts without leaving their sites.

Hulu, a joint online video project of NBC Universal and News Corp , is set to go live Wednesday with programming from Time Warner's television group, Lions Gate Entertainment and sports groups. A beta version of the site was launched in October.

YouTube has unveiled an experimental page that will allow a small group of randomly chosen users to receive personalized video recommendations, lists of videos added to friends' pages and other exclusive social features.

Many users around the world could not access the YouTube site for about two hours on Sunday. The company blamed the outage on erroneous routing information introduced by a Pakistani Internet service provider. Pakistani authorities ordered ISPs there to block the site on Friday.

YouTube Thursday announced an expansion of its mobile applications that significantly expands the number of supported cell phone technologies that can support the viewing of its tens of millions of videos.

If you've ever wanted to travel to Paris, but just never got around to it, you can now use the Google Earth software tool and watch a sunset filmed from the top floor of the Eiffel Tower, or view video clips of other popular spots in the City of Lights.

Google has started to provide video clips in Google News, a feature it had been widely expected to add to its article search and aggregation site and which Yahoo and AOL already offer in their news sites.